Six short lines, and almost every one of them accuses the speaker. "Seeker" sounds like a title for a pilgrim or a hero, but the voice that follows is not sure it deserves either word. The speaker arrives "among the fallen" with an admission that undoes any halo: "loving for advantage." The central idea is that even tenderness can be a form of hunting, and that the person doing it may be the first victim of his own motives.
The opening couplet is deliberately double. To "come among the fallen" could be a gesture of compassion, someone descending to stand with the broken. "Fallen" is a heavy word, with echoes of fallen soldiers, fallen angels and moral failure, and the poem never says which it means. The second line settles the question of motive, though not the question of who the fallen are. Love here has a price tag. The preposition "for" turns affection into a tool, and the plain, unembarrassed tone makes the confession feel worse. Nobody is shouting. The speaker simply states what he is.
The second couplet changes the scene without warning: "A cook hunts / a constant heart." Where did a cook come from? The poem gives no explanation, and the gap is part of its effect. A cook handles hearts as meat, so the image is faintly gruesome, and "hunts" brings in the chase and the kill. Yet "constant" is a word from the vocabulary of faithfulness, the heart that does not change. So the line holds two appetites at once, one for devotion and one for dinner. It also echoes the first stanza. The cook, like the speaker, seeks something precious for the sake of using it. The hard, clipped sounds of "cook hunts" and "constant heart" make the line feel like a quick movement with a knife.
The final couplet turns the hunt inward. "Lice haunt my coat" is the poem's most physical image, and it is humble and unpleasant: parasites living in the outer layer a person wears against the world. "Haunt" is a clever choice. It belongs to ghosts, not insects, so the lice become something closer to a guilty presence that cannot be shaken off. The word also quietly rhymes with "hunts" from the stanza before, which links the hunter and the haunted. The last line, "me against me," then explains the picture. The lice are not an outside enemy. They stand for the speaker's own self-division, a person who is both host and parasite, both the one who loves and the one who profits from loving. "Against" also echoes the "a" sounds of "among" and "advantage," so the poem's opening vocabulary comes back, bent into conflict.
Formally the poem is spare. There are three unrhymed couplets, no regular meter, and each stanza is one complete sentence. The sound-patterning is subtle and does more work than any rhyme scheme would. The lines also thin out as they go. The first stanza has the longest words, "fallen," "loving," "advantage." By the end almost everything is a single syllable ("Lice haunt my coat"), and the poem lands on the blunt, almost childlike repetition of "me against me." The language gets simpler as the self-knowledge gets harsher. Each couplet also pairs a statement with a sharpening of it, so the poem moves like a series of small blows.
That compression is what makes the poem worth reading. It would be easy to write a long, self-flagellating confession about selfish love. Here the images do the confessing: the cook, the coat, the lice. The reader has to connect them and so becomes complicit in the diagnosis. The poem also refuses comfort. It offers no repentance and no resolution, and its title stays an open question. Seeker of what? Of the fallen, of a constant heart, or of a way out of the quarrel with oneself? The poem's honesty lies in leaving that unanswered, since the speaker is still hunting while being hunted.